Essays in the Category "Laws and Regulations"
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DVD Encryption Broken
A version of this article appeared as a guest commentary on ZDNet.
The scheme to protect DVDs has been broken. There are now freeware programs on the net that remove the copy protection on DVDs, allowing them to be played, edited, and copied without restriction.
This should be no surprise to anyone, least of all to the entertainment industry.
The protection scheme is seriously flawed in several ways. Each DVD is encrypted with something called Content Scrambling System (CCS). It has a 40-bit key. (I have no idea why. The NSA and the FBI shouldn’t care about DVD encryption. There aren’t any encrypted terrorist movies they need to watch.) It’s not even a very good algorithm. But even if the encryption were triple-DES, this scheme would be flawed…
Electronic Speech – For Domestic Use Only
The U.S. State Department recently ruled that some forms of electronic speech are not protected by the First Amendment and can be prohibited from export. This decision raises questions about freedom of speech on the information superhighway. As business communications continue to migrate from paper mail to electronic mail, these questions will become more important. It is vital that laws address this new form of speech.
Last year, I wrote a book called Applied Cryptography> (John Wiley & Sons, 1994), which explains cryptography in nonmathematical language. It describes how to build cryptography into products, illustrates cryptographic techniques, and evaluates algorithms and makes recommendations on their quality. It even includes source-code listings that enable readers to implement many of the algorithms and techniques described…
High-Tech Government Snooping: Anti-Crime or Orwell Revisited?
Good news! The federal government respects and is working to protect your privacy… just as long as you don’t want privacy from the government itself.
In April 1994, the Clinton administration, cleaning up old business from the Bush administration, introduced a new cryptography initiative that ensures the government’s ability to conduct electronic surveillance. The first fruit of this initiative is CLIPPER, designed to secure telephone communications.
CLIPPER is a tamper-resistant chip designed by the National Security Agency, a super-secret branch of the Department of Defense…
Clipper Gives Big Brother Far Too Much Power
In April, the Clinton administration, cleaning up business left over from the Bush administration, introduced a cryptography initiative that gives government the ability to conduct electronic surveillance. The first fruit of this initiative is Clipper, a National Security Agency (NSA)-designed, tamper-resistant VLSI chip. The stated purpose of this chip is to secure telecommunications.
Clipper uses a classified encryption algorithm. Each Clipper chip has a special key, not needed for messages, that is used only to encrypt a copy of each user’s message key. Anyone who knows the key can decrypt wiretapped communications protected with this chip. The claim is that only the government will know this key and will use it only when authorized to do so by a court…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.